How consumers let down their guard on web privacy

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There's a piece in the NYT by Somini Sengupta on how we are increasingly turning over our data online "in exchange for a deal we can’t refuse." The story profiles Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who studies how online users make these choices. "In a series of provocative experiments, he has shown that despite how much we say we value our privacy — and we do, again and again — we tend to act inconsistently." [NYT]

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The Cobham catalog, exposed by The Intercept, features countless pages of surveillance gadgets sold to U.S. police to spy on American citizens: tiny black boxes with a big interest in you. In the creepily bland feature lists and nerdy product names is a whisper of a dark future; perhaps darker than anyone can imagine.

This image depicts the most commonly-found stylesheet colors on the web’s top sites—Paul Hebert did an amazing amount of analysis and this is just one of the intriguing visualizations he came up with. Most of these are obvious staples, especially HTML red and blue, though it’s interesting how far the blue “cluster” is from the […]

The Black Friday Mac Bundle 2.0 is one of the Boing Boing Store’s best-selling Mac bundles yet, and it’s about to come to an end. If you don’t get your copy now, here’s what you’ll be missing:This bundle comes packing 9 top-rated Mac apps in one package, at the hugely discounted price of just $23.99. […]

The Boing Boing Store’s Gift Guide is full of ideas for pretty much anyone in your life like hipster ice cub trays, Xbox controllers, Halo Boards, and even diamond necklaces. As always, all products in the Boing Boing Store come at great discounts, too. Shop by price bucket starting at under $20. Under $20:Bloxx Jumbo Ice Trays […]

Unlike traditional lighters, the SaberLight features an electronic plasma beam that’s both rechargeable and butane-free. This sleek lighter is even approved by TSA, so you’ll never be stuck buying lighters you’ll just have to throw away partially used. For some people, like me, this is a pretty big game-changer. The SaberLight’s beam is actually both hotter and cleaner […]

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I’m definitely ‘guilty’ of purporting to care about privacy while at the same time happily using most of google’s products and posting away on facebook.

Rightly or wrongly, I am more likely to trust what I see as big, anonymous computer systems than individual people I can see.

Someone at the pet adoption place wants my social security number? “No way,” I think, “why would you need that? I’m not even giving my email address”. Meanwhile, the fact that Google has all of my email, voicemail, and most of my browsing history only concerns me slightly. (More now that I’ve stopped to think about it.) Similarly, I find those people who check receipts at the door of the shopping center to be deeply offensive and intrusive… but it doesn’t worry me so much than an a computer somewhere has recorded everything I’ve purchased. I guess I’m one of the inconsistent ones.

It’s very natural. We’ve not had a chance to evolve a distrust for inanimate objects. A real, flesh and blood alive thing is clearly a potential threat, but not a computer (which used to be strange and unfamiliar but now we all have one — it’d be like being scared of your fridge stealing your identity)